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By now, Star Wars: The Old Republic has become a bit of a worn-out topic. Nearing a year after its original release, the MMO that was poised to conquer the industry has merely dwindled, joining the dozens of other big-budget titles which weren't able to overcome the industry's titan, World of Warcraft.
There are any number of reasons behind all this - marketing, changing trends in gaming, the falling viability of subscription-based play, and more - but in this article, I'd like to address some fundamental design and story points which I think put a significant damper on the game's success, and may have foretold it long before the game itself was actually on shelves.
Tell Me a Story
Star Wars: The Old Republic's main advantage over other MMOs, if you believe the marketing, is that it wasn't just bigger and better, it was different. Most MMOs avoid dabbling too much in storytelling, especially the more complex and cinematic kind that's seen in modern RPGs. While many players follow World of Warcraft's lore religiously, the fact is that ultimately it's a stage for new quests, scenarios, environments, and gameplay elements to act on. The Old Republic, meanwhile, treats its story not as scenery, but as the fundamental driving force behind all gameplay. Players aren't expected to keep with the game for its engrossing character system or excellent combat, or even MMO standards like guilds and raids - they're there to experience a Star Wars adventure on the epic scale an MMO can provide.
This was, I think, the first nail in the proverbial coffin for The Old Republic. BioWare specifically took fan feedback into account when creating the game - the goal was to make an MMO that took all the adventure of the popular Knights of the Old Republic series, and use that to fuel a much bigger experience. They weren't acting out of ignorance, and in fact, with the data they had, this probably seemed like a great idea, especially as much of the early buzz around the game was quite positive. An MMO with a real story and modern, cinematic production values? How could anyone say no?
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The desire to make KotOR on an MMO's scale may have been fundamentally incompatible with the needs of MMOs in the first place.
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However, MMOs don't retain users on story - they retain users month in, month out using social features (guilds, friends list, etc.), regular incentives (daily quests, item hand-outs, etc.), and content expansions to keep things fresh. A game whose primary focus is on storytelling is generally only going to remain fun for as long as there is story to tell (and it usually needs to be good, for that matter). Once that is exhausted, there's little reason to keep playing unless the rest of the game can keep players coming back.
Unfortunately, producing story content on The Old Republic's level is extremely expensive. It requires writing, scripting, level art, character art, voice work, animation work, and more to come together. Even with less detail and care paid than in BioWare's own Mass Effect series, the hours of cutscenes and dialogue sequences generally take the longest to implement of any other content. So The Old Republic was doubly damned - it depends on content for which there is a very sharp dropoff in interest, and it is lacking in content compared to most other MMOs because the scope of creating it makes it far harder to put out frequent updates and expansions.
Welcome to Urban Sprawl
The Old Republic's issues with story were only compounded by a more gameplay-oriented problem. Knights of the Old Republic served as the basis for The Old Republic, BioWare suggest, and therefore many fans of the modern RPG classic should be delighted to return to the gameplay that introduced many of them to RPGs. Except, things didn't really work out that way.
Knights of the Old Republic is by no means a small game, but it still has a pretty tight focus. It has a strong central narrative and a few major side stories going on, usually one on each hub world. Peppered amongst it are dozens of optional quests with self-contained arcs. Most RPG players will average around 30-50 hours of play-time depending on how much optional content they choose to engage in, following the complete story arc from beginning to end, with the end state of the game vastly different from the start of it.
This is facilitated by level design which is also fairly compact. Although the game attempts to provide the illusion of size, a new quest objective is rarely more than five minutes away, and backtracking is kept to a minimum. The environments aren't tiny by any means, but they are precisely the right size to facilitate the amount of content in them and maintain decent pacing throughout the game. Knights of the Old Republic doesn't really have a great story, in other words, but what it does have is a well-paced one, fueled by new gameplay objectives on at maximum an hourly basis, and they are structured in such a way that you'll frequently be traveling to new locations with minimal backtracking or time wasted between them all.
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Running down hallways. You'll be doing a lot of this in SWTOR. Probably this exact same hallway, and probably about 20 times every day. The life of a bounty hunter isn't always exciting.
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The Old Republic, in an attempt to cater to MMO-sized player counts, as well as to, I suspect, pad out play-time, hosts far larger game levels. Most planets in the game have a very typical setup in which quest givers are placed at one end of the map, often accessible only through awkward and convoluted transport routes, nestled in over-sized buildings, and their objectives are placed gradually farther and farther away - often with few truly convenient fast travel points in between. Almost all of these areas have dozens upon dozens of enemies which aren't difficult to defeat, but which require frequent resting (for health recovery) to get past. And curiously, every city and large building seems to have a gigantic pillar in the way for culling purposes, but which also takes abour 30 seconds to get around each time.
What this means is that the majority of time in The Old Republic is not spent engaging in adventure and thrilling narrative - it is spent running back and forth, from A to B, typically doing nothing of interest. When you're playing The Old Republic, you're rarely actually questing about, doing Jedi or Sith business, you're either holding down the W key, mashing the same two hotkeys over and over in a combat encounter, or sitting there waiting while hit points regenerate. The the biggest sin of any game is to pad itself out with needless time-wasting tasks, and The Old Republic features this from the beginning and never, ever lets up.
This isn't to say that all games are devoid of pointless travel time. Let's face it, many, if not most games do have environments and enemies created specifically to slow the player down... and many titles, especially traditional RPGs, have a degree of backtracking. And it's a well-known secret that MMOs are often built specifically to make certain tasks take longer than they really should in the hope that it will keep players there longer, thus increasing the probability they will spend more money on subscriptions and premium items. However, in The Old Republic, the size of the environments becomes a major hindrance as simply getting where you need to be is pointlessly frustrating even in early levels. This is a direct and fundamental contradiction to the fast-paced action and adventure that is a Star Wars hallmark, and as a result the thrill of playing as a Jedi Knight or bounty hunter falls off significantly even just a few hours after stating the game.
Plight of the Ineffectual
MMOs are status quo incarnate. They are big, big games that exist not to provide reactivity and nuance, but to provide endless expanses of terrain to cross, monsters to fight, and quests to solve. As far to the horizon as you can see, the odd irony of all that content is that MMOs rarley if ever let players have an impact on it. It's consistency that rules the day - players should be able to log in anywhere, at any time, and have a familiar experience whether they're choosing to play for 20 minutes or 20 hours.
Moreover, the fact that the game world is inhabited by hundreds of players simultaneously means that it's pretty much impossible to make lasting changes to things, even to non-player characters in the game world, because they always need to be at a given location to hand out quests or sell gear. Players need that familiarity and predictability to ensure an optimal play experience, and this necessarily leads to a static game world.
There are exceptions to this. Player-versus-player content typically has quite a degree of variance - factions and guilds can win or lose ground, and in some games can come to dominate entire battlefields. Positions of leadership change over time and there's always an urge for players to do better to overcome each other. This is all pretty much entirely run by players, for players - all developers need to do most of the time is provide the rules necessary for interesting competitive play, and players will bring all the politics and nuance themselves. If there is any dynamic element in The Old Republic, theoretically it would be found here.
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Heroic battles might take place, but no matter how many Sith Lords you defeat, there will always be more. In fact, they'll probably appear in the exact same room you're standing in not 20 seconds after you've fought the last.
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However, none of this bodes well for a game with a heavy focus on single-player-style storytelling. Consistency and status quo is almost antithetical to an interesting story, because it's impossible for characters to develop, for locations to evolve, or be built up or destroyed, and, most importantly, for the player to ever make an impact on anything at all. The need to service thousands of other Chosen Ones all at once means that, even in a game with heavy amounts of instancing, the public spaces in the world are pretty much stuck exactly as they are. It's possible to instance just about anything plot-related, but then you end up with a very empty, anti-social MMO very quickly.
The narrative of PvP play is rarely much more substantial. Most PvP narrative comes entirely from the players themselves navigating the structures of tournaments and warzones, and while many games try to glue on a veneer of importance, ultimately the story of PvP comes down to those participating, winning and losing. Players interested in a more traditional style of storytelling get little from it, and it's hard to feel like you're champion of the galaxy when there are a hundred other Jedi Knights just like you taking part in a not-so-friendly game of Huttball for valor points.
It is beyond jarring to say "go kill these five dangerous thus!" only to realize they're just respawning trash mobs who are going to reappear in 30 seconds anyway, or to collect valuable research data from an enemy fortress, only to discover you need just four disks of the 20 in the area. The Old Republic goes to great lengths to tell epic stories of intergalactic politics, war and heroism, but it simply can't because it's impossible to ever feel like you've accomplished anything at all - thus, even those players who might be interested in the story, and who perhaps even purchased the game as their first MMO expecting the same sort of experience Knights of the Old Republic provided, will likely find themselves underwhelmed by the content available.
Closing Thoughts
Personally, I haven't scratched the surface of The Old Republic. There are hundreds of hours of gameplay and it would probably take me a solid year or two to fully explore them. But after playing the game and coming to terms with the issues explained above, I no longer have any desire to keep playing. Mechanically, it does very little to differentiate it from other games out there - its character system is rigid, the combat is tedious rather than exciting, and treadmill's end point isn't compelling enough to keep me playing.
But the story, that all-important, hyped-up story, its single-player focus, and all its big-budget presentation, is the biggest hindrance of all, because it stands in direct contrast to the needs of an MMO - frequent new content and compelling social features - and in fact, only invites negative comparisons to other story-driven single-player titles. I don't think The Old Republic is successful enough at the whole MMO thing to really stand out from any of the other dozens of competitors who failed to topple Warcraft, but it's that desire to do something different, to live up to fans' expectations, that condemned it in the first place.
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Or maybe a hybrid model, with large open-play zones (for grinding, gathering, bear rump quests, etc.) studded with instanced areas where the overarching plot can happen.
I only played the game in beta just before release, but even based on that experience I had no intention of picking the game up when it launched. There is a ton of story, lots of scripted and VO cut scenes, etc, all of which make a the great Bioware games that many of us have enjoyed in the past. The problem is that they don't work well for an MMO.
When I was playing in the beta, I felt like I was playing a single player game, or a game that had single player content with some things you could do with friends. The constant cut scenes every time I just wanted to get a quest pulled me away from the experience because I knew it was an MMO and that it would have a subscription fee, but it felt like I was playing a single player game, an experience I'm not willing to pay for.
The key point, I believe, that Eric was making was that the way they implemented the story is expensive and time consuming. Had they simply included quest logs, like other MMOs, or skipped the VOs, they could have potentially included more story and more content. This becomes an even bigger issue as time goes on and they have to push out more content to keep people playing. When some of the main selling points are the conversation choices and VO work, dropping them in additional content looks bad, you're leaving out what you were selling the product based on. If you keep it, it takes longer and costs more to put out content, resulting in it being spaced further apart or just having less to it. Neither situation is good for a game type that lives or dies by keeping people interested and paying.
If you played WoW way back in the day (around 1.6 or earlier), one of the things you may remember is that the quest test when you spoke to an NPC used to scroll, as though they were speaking to you. Just as with the VOs in SWTOR, most people probably read faster than the quest is progressing for you, so a mod to make the text instant was one of the earlier ones created. This was quickly added as a UI option within a couple patches, and I'm pretty sure that scrolling text isn't even a choice now. While these fancy methods for delivering story work great in single player games, they tend cost far more to create than they really add to a game, and when implementing them results is less actual play content, people are going to get bored.
Here's a short list of some of the key abilities a good GM brings to the table (so to speak):
* Creative: can quickly generate content that's tailored to what the players enjoy.
* Adaptable: can modify elements of prebuilt content frameworks based on unexpected player actions.
* Thematic: can make sure that content created on the fly still contributes to the overall epic storyline.
* Multi-Level: can easily switch between big-picture themes and immediate tactical play as necessary to keep gameplay interesting.
PvE-centric MMORPGs eventually feel unsatisfying because computer software doesn't yet do any of these things well, much less all of them. You get the content everyone else gets, and it doesn't change. No one is watching what you enjoy doing and adapting the game to keep it fun for you.
Something similar is true for the mechanics. Many (though not all) of the PvE features in MMORPGs, such as aggro management and mob spawning, are efforts to build special-purpose code systems that accomplish the basic rules applications that human GMs can apply almost effortlessly. And yet for all the effort put into tweaking them from game to game, they're still fragile and exploitable.
To my knowledge, there is no MMORPG that even attempts the larger-scale abilities, such as dynamically modifying prebuilt content to reward a player's creativity or to illuminate a larger story theme. And the result of not yet capably replacing human GMs is that most MMORPGs feel static and lowest-common-denominator.
To be fair, not every human GM is brilliant. And simulating even an average human's creative abilities is a hard problem.
But that's the challenge. I believe it's that lack of real-time adaptability that is the source of most complaints about MMORPGs. It's telling that the parts of these games that feel most interesting are the parts created or affected by other human players, such as PvP and whole-game economies. When the PvE parts of MMORPGs also can dynamically adapt to what individual players and groups do, then they'll be equally entertaining.
That is probably 50% of the problem, the other 50% is the unbelieveable environments. too much static cardboard box, not enough intelligence.
And this is not een to get into the other aspect of dymanic movement.
Like quaffing a potion of gaseous form and floating through the cracks of a door. or getting blown away.
this is also essntial, many games have atempted this have any succeeded in strategic map use? Beside tactical rts's ?
And were not talking rocket science theatre here .. just actually using a map to determine game play ideas.
I don't believe significant success in this area will come from tweaking the existing model. Blizzard already scored the second-mover advantage with WoW; fiddling with (or adding more) static content-delivery systems seems very unlikely to differentiate any new game enough for it to become a new center of gravity.
EA/Bioware were not wrong at the strategic level to try to leverage Bioware's perceived strength in storytelling in MMORPGs. But Eric nailed SWTOR's problem at the architecture-design level, which is that there's no way for enough story-by-developer to be created to satisfy the demand for fresh content... at least, not with the now-conventional gameplay architecture design of MMORPGs. The deepest problem with SWTOR, I believe, was not choosing to emphasize story; it was choosing a delivery model incapable of sustaining that emphasis.
That's where I think an effort to step back and rethink MMORPG design is required. The problem is the content delivery bottleneck, which is preventing these games from more quickly and effectively giving players the kinds of content they enjoy. New designs that stop trying to copy the content-delivery design assumptions of previous games are what will uncork the next wave of successful MMORPGs.
I think this will be solved most effectively by going directly at the lack of a human GM. But any design rethinking of static content provision will be a step in the right direction.
I don't think the buck stops there though, the current tools for play are very "basic" in nature, and even with the tools to creative adventures they would have to be improved several layers of intelligence thick. (Talking environments mainly here)
Even with a GM, goign around and killing monsters/looting chests/ interacting with NPC's is pretty narrow ~ still even if randomized and creatively placed /changed by human GM factor.
And then there is also the problem of movement as a what to static motivator ? Movement wasd / jump/swim/dodge/spell combos hardly scratches the surface of what is physically possible. what if I want to jump through a mirror, light a rope, lift open a grate, grab a ledge, drink a potion, read, inspect for traps.
In both the following cases it's the environments that are the failure .. because .. the character is the focus.
but I agree with Darren the character needs to be the sole creative propiety of the player not simply a mechanic of a system.
So that is at least 4 (almost) completely untouched areas, on top of multi use tactital play.
And then there i the issue of social play which is also mostly broken, the integration .. of players vs content is broken, and the GM effect ect. the platform needs to change.
there are other things .. but those hit the majors .. and I don't think they are outside of our technology. I think that in particular they are simply not well thgouht through as to how easy it would be to monetize content "packs"
I really don't believe a separate GM player set needs to be introduced, I believe the players need to be allowed to have a far greater impact on the world around them. If the players were allowed to build structures, hire NPCs to perform various functions, and add various interactive bits to the world, they would handle much if not most of your content needs. The developer could easily hire a cadre of "professional players" to seed the world from the start, but they wouldn't need tools that differ from those of any other player. Then the developers could focus on adding capabilities for players and making the world naturally react to the activities of the players
I respect your opinion, but I definitely stand in 100% alignment with Bart on this.
The Gm effect isn't just about changing aspects of the game on the fly or adding some material that wasn't there, it's about the social relevance and personal nature of a roleplay experience.
Roleplaying withoout a human director is much like 1 hand clapping or yelling in a canyon. It has no meaning without other personal creative resounding.
If I created the greatest story in the world what value would it have if no one considered it?
the same thing applies for the "most interesting dungeon aspects"
Delivering an interactive story in a video game is like writing a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book - something like the 'Fighting_Fantasy' gamebooks if your aware of them. These are definitely fun to read, but a pain to write up as you have to keep a flowchart available of all the choices a character makes, and what branch of nodes lead to where. It requires a skilled writer with the ability of keeping track of characters, items, and scenes in the story and how they could be molded by the reader's choices. Then you combine this with the cinematic desire shown in video games - voice acting, model and face animations, camera angles, lighting, etc. - and it would be pretty obvious that this gets very expensive.
Back to the single-player story in a multi-player game, I think its more of a distraction. The idea of a multi-player game is you playing it with your buddies to have a fun time. Its like a board game of "Monopoly" or "Scrabble" where you are hanging out, learning about what your friend's dog ate this time or arguing about whether Rogues can get three sneak attacks on shurikens. So you got a catch-22 scenario here: If you want to go in for the story, you might be rude to your friends for focusing on that instead of socializing with them. But if you play the game for your friends, then you may miss important plot elements in the story.
There are stories told to a massive audience in films, but they could get away with that as they require the audience to be a passive role in the story. Interactive storytelling in video games require an active role from the players, which could possibly work in a single-player game. Multi-player games? It could be possible, but as this article states, "The Old Republic" doesn't do it so well.
I do agree, and this is the major strong point of the game. Unfortunately, instead of an MMO that takes a year to really finish (or more), you have an MMO where you have to start over every few weeks to keep trying new content. Not necessary a good trade-off.
It really isn't a good trade-off for the most part. If you don't mind my asking, can you think of any developers who seem like they might take a similar idea and try to adapt it for a single-player title? It'd be a shame to have two interesting storytelling concepts this year fall into the abyss because the developers shoved them into ill-fitting MMOs.
In RPGs, speaking of triple-A devs, you have Bethesda, who likely won't (though sort of did some of this in Morrowind using the guilds), and BioWare (who also likely won't). CD Projekt might do something similar but all their games so far focused on single fixed characters. Obsidian might, but they have less control over what they end up developing.
If there is potential for this sort of thing, it'll be in smaller indie-type games, or those which rely more on procedural content (like Soldak's titles).
A video game's story based around the class a player picks at the beginning? Nothing comes to mind which fits that criteria. Only thing that would be closest would be "Dragon Age: Origins" with its introduction scenes dependent on your race and class. But then all the "introduction scenes" mesh together at the 'real' starting point in Ostagar.
That would be an interesting direction for an interactive storytelling device. I think part of the reason why developers implement a binary good/evil meter for characters (like the light/dark side of the force here in "The Old Republic") is to give some metric to the player explaining their character's personality. Yet this doesn't really explain the character well since its just a metric on how 'evil' or how 'good' the character is in the eyes of the developer - the one that gives the player the option of saving a kitten from a tree or burning the tree down. However, what if we kept that metric system but it defined how 'skilled' your avatar is at their job?
Say you start the game as usual and are given the call to adventure stunt in other video games. But depending on how long you take to overcome a challenge or how well you perform, your character will be marked with a 'rank' on how well you perform in general with this class. You can still progress forward in the game like any other, but the game-world responds to the character depending on their rank. If your character has a low rank towards end game, then they might not be able to access end-game quests or fight against monsters that laugh at how pitiful they are. Similarly, NPCs in the game would probably shake their head and speculate that its somehow 'luck' that you got this far.
It might need some more fleshing out, but its one idea I've speculated to make the 'interactive storytelling' in video games better.
Mild spoilers below!
While playing as a Jedi, the storyline was based on the premise that I was defeating corrupted Jedi with a special, draining skill I'd learned. Every time a corrupted Jedi was saved, I was told that my character was becoming more and more exhausted, and that eventually he'd waste away. The story was showing me all this, and characters were speaking to me under that assumption, but at the same time I was levelling up and gaining more and stronger abilities for my character to use. The gameplay and storyline were both fun, but the two together conflicted.
For another example, at one point in the bounty hunter storyline you come into possession of a fabled collection of treasure, and you're flush with fat stacks of cash. It's a lot of fun. Unfortunately it's not actually reflected in the amount of credits you can spend or access in any tangible way.
In a way, it doesn't actually matter. The game was enjoyable, and it's easy to look beyond it, but it's definitely an interesting situation to think about.
I'm willing to bet the time wasting travel bits will be something you can pay to bypass when the game goes free to play. I know high level players can get rocket boots now and I'm sure they'll use a similar mechanic.
Moreover, the fact that the game world is inhabited by hundreds of players simultaneously means that it's pretty much impossible to make lasting changes to things, even to non-player characters in the game world, because they always need to be at a given location to hand out quests or sell gear. Players need that familiarity and predictability to ensure an optimal play experience, and this necessarily leads to a static game world.
I'd just like to point out World of Warcraft has partially solved this problem. Thanks to there phasing technology they can actually "change" how two player see the world. The best example would be in there Mount Hyjal zone, think of it a forest burn down by cultist and fire elements, after a few quest(saving animals, gathering seeds etc) the player is then able to revive the forest. This little technology has certain made WoW less "static" but I'm guessing it still abit resource intensive so it seem to only be used on several important point in there story arch.
The core long-term issues have absolutely nothing to do with their monetization model or that they over reached on the use of the SW brand. The solutions are not around some quick turn monetization model, the latest of which is F2P. Im sure some MMO F2P types will save this game on a basic level. But there is a VAST difference between saving your butt financially and an MMO that has truly become all it could be. Almost 2M subscribers speaks to the hope that people had; where it is now, well under 1M subscribers, has to do with fundamental breaches that occurred. Somebody needs to wake up to these truths if the game is ever to be fixed.
Article after article by BEAN COUNTERS cite stat after stat or make the issues about things that never address the CORE GAME MECHANICS and the GLOBAL ATTITUDE which do a much better job of defining the real truths behind the massive failure of this MMO. I cant imagine what all these hard working (many of them now laid off) devs and visionary managers must feel like to have something they cared so much about, shattered into pieces after years of work.
#1- The current mentality is to INVENT Star Wars content versus truly giving players/fans the Star Wars we know. When you constantly invent outside of a powerfully established context, you’re asking people to learn about and embrace your version of the cannon versus offering players the ability to enjoy fully the SW experiences they want to play. The story arcs that Ive played, three in total, are very good, the best of any MMO or any other game and yes, very iconic. Some of the side quests score decently well in this regard. But for the most part, this game is KOTOR on steroids and not even close to an SW MMO experience. Once you make it to 50 to include end game content, the game just falls flat on its face in terms of it being a SW license and as an MMO, plus they abandon the very thing they hook you on- story!
A very good example of this mentality is the invented planet that they are choosing to launch, which is being marketed as an all PvP planet. They are obviously playing to the quick fix, heavy PvP crowd from which F2P will bode well with (for minimal cost), which has nothing to do with truly offering the Opus of Star Wars experiences. Put another way, they way from which they have chosen to "fix" the game is a TOTAL FAILURE TO TRULY DOUBLE DOWN ON OFFERING A SUSTAINABLE STAR WARS EXPERIENCE that keeps a core base coming back for more and growing. Had they launched Endor or Dathomir as planets, well known and mysterious, highly desirable locations to explore and to “experience iconic Star Wars moments”- that alone, just launching one of those planets, increasing some options to explore, having good story lines, a Dathomir end game experience (talk about sexy? WOW!) that alone would have immediately resulted in more players and more revenue.
#2- If Im a Bounty Hunter and Im a level 50, I want to Bounty Hunt. Not gonna happen in TOR. If I am a Level 50 Smuggler, I want to smuggle, a Jedi Master- I want to work with the Jedi Council to go on important missions. NONE OF THIS IS AVAILABLE once your turn 50 in TOR, which is a HUGE STORY OVERSIGHT and has resulted in TOR leaving a ton of money on the table. A moment ago, I stated that had they launched a more iconic planet and opened up the gameplay framework, to allow for more exploration, they would have had a boon in return customers. Now lets add to that Level 50's that can Bounty Hunt, be Spys, run missions for the Jedi Council, so on and so forth- and that number of people that would bring back and the core TOR population would soar. IS EA IN TOUCH WITH THESE TRUTHS ON ANY LEVEL? The answer as evidenced by all of their actions, is no.
You have a game that does a great job of drawing you in through their story arcs and BAM, your reward for turning 50 is ALL OF THAT goes away. Your companions have nothing else to say to you, at least the ones you’ve maxed out, thats it- your relationship with that NPC companion is, for all practical purposes, done. TOR wants you to (in fact, forces you to- if you want to enjoy companion perks) max out all of your companion's XP. So if you had a blast with Kira, ALL THIS BUILD UP with her, you're gonna get married, you secretly broke Jedi rules and then level 50 hits or whenever you max out her storyline, then nothing, you're done, THE SILENT WIFE named Kira. From that point on she will only give you route, basic responses; basically, you have a talking test dummy.
How did this happen? How do you make those kinds of decisions? How do create a game so built around epic story lines and companion relationships only to then abandon all of that once a person hits 50? Again, this is a failure to NOT LEVERAGE THE BRAND ENOUGH versus leveraging it too much or any particular type of monetization model.
#3- Its friggin’ Star Wars! I want to explore and fully experience this cool world. Not going to happen in TOR. Ohlen stated in his article that they never meant to change the MMO experience, only to add story. Every MMO Ive played and I’ve played a lot of the big ones to include Galaxies - WoW - LOTR - Rift and others, let you truly explore the world you’re in. Rift even has a solid reward system for such desires with some fun perks.
A friend and I were talking about the game Star Wars Galaxies. I shared a story about one day when I was zooming along, minding my own business riding my speeder on the high level planet (it TRULY felt like a planet) of Endor, on the shoreline of a lake there, when out of the blue I get knocked off my bike- which then blows up and I hear Stormtroopers telling me to halt. I look behind me and see two ships full of stormies unloading and coming after me. I popped up my chat for my guild and said, "you won't believe this". Seconds later, I was in a fight for my life. The "trigger" for this random event had to do with a system they deployed that tied in how many imp kills I had, both PvP and NPC, that related to my reputation rating. Folks, this was a random encounter that made my experience feel rather over the top real! I was on a SW high for days.
No exploring. No iconic Star Wars world events (think Galaxies and Rift). Nothing meaningfully Star Wars after 50. Very narrow control on skill trees with Hybrids being a big no-no. Next to no interaction with our Star Wars environments. But sure, the real issue is people having to pay a monthly fee. So very sad, given how awesome the game trailers were, give how awesome this game could have been.
#4-Rhakghouls- seriously? Fine, its a call back to KOTOR, so a little bit here and there. But to make that such a huge deal throughout? In operations? In your one world event? Do you people even understand what the attraction of Star Wars is all about- because it aint Rhakghouls! And although KOTOR has some great merits, people didn't sign up for a KOTOR MMO NOR WAS IT MARKETED AS SUCH, they signed up for an EPIC SW experience! Give me a world event where Sith Masters or Jedi Masters suddenly appear on the opposing factions Capital Ships. Have a Call To Arms world event where I see twenty of my fellow players called back to the Jedi temple because its under attack. Give me iconic breathtaking and wide open SW worlds to not just fight in, but also to explore. THATS Star Wars!
#5- The general perception that Bioware and EA could care less has been a huge issue, regardless of all their press saying otherwise. They launched an economy that was utterly ridiculous in terms of all the costs for healing, repairs, transaction fees, etc.. Their tier based equipment and mod systems, which have been constantly changing rendering all your hard work useless, all that made the game anything but user friendly. Then there is the Legacy system complete with a Legacy XP bar for perks that I need to spend a fortune to buy, but somehow that supposed to feel like something I earned? And If you bought the Collectors Edition, you really felt a deep sense of betrayal, of Bait and Switch. Sure, the shipped items with the CE were nice, but VERY CLEARLY STATED IN THE RAMP UP is that we would get a vendor that would be updated regularly with exclusive new items and content. Never happened. The in game benefit to having a security key was dramatically better then having bought the CE. I could go on and on. Side quests, once Ive leveled to 50, I still have to waste my time on all the dialog when Im leveling a toon? I get that being important for a new toon's core storyline quests, but all the side quests too? So leveling 3 toons MANDATES dredging through all the same side content again?
They need to STOP spitting out statistics and STOP throwing out quick fixes. The need to give people the experience they paid for, the SW experience they marketed; give players Dathomir and bounties to hunt, things to smuggle, Jedi council meetings to attend that spark great adventures; give fans back the companions they WANT TO PLAY versus forcing us to level companions fans could care less about. And in spite of what all the so called data TOR, especially EA likes to tout- the game will actually turnaround.
A recent fact that proves yet again, that they dont get it? The widely reported failure of their recent live event. If they are not below 500K subs, they will be soon. Lucas Arts needs to step in, fire the people that continue to make such horrible decisions and get their act together.
You bring up a good point about the character classes as well. In most (read: fantasy) MMOs your character class has more to do with how you handle yourself in a fight than what your character does with their life. Plundering evil/enemies for their secret treasures is the name of the game. But I've noticed in many Sci-Fi MMOs that the classes are usually professions outside the scope of the adventurer. Bounty Hunters are going to stalk and capture/kill their targets via ambush, not assault a fortress. Smugglers don't even want to fight, the whole point is to sneak product from place to place. I think the initial setup in Galaxies did a much better job with this. It was just too "simulation" for most people. Bioware's attempt to force the tank/healer/DPS model on Star Wars screwed this up.